Wednesday, May 13, 2009

GOP embraces its inner idiot

I had the same reaction as Ed Kilgore did when I first heard about the GOP's intention to mount "a formal resolution calling on GOPers to start referring to the Democratic Party as the 'Democrat Socialist Party.'" I thought it was just a ploy engineered by the way far right crazies of the party. A bad joke that would be treated as such by the leadership. But no.

According to sources speaking to Politico's Roger Simon, the Republican National Committee will approve the resolution at a special meeting of the RNC called for that very purpose.

They're calling a special meeting to officially call the Democratic Party names like elementary school kids on the playground instead of using their energy to come up with alternate solutions to the policies they find so objectionable? How much sillier can they get? But as Kilgore says there is a serious side to this.

It's easy to mock this stuff, but it's actually pretty significant: we are not talking about some radio blowhard or self-promoting Fox "personality" in this case, but the Republican National Committee. If, as Simon predicts, it approves this resolution, Republicans who like to think of themselves as serious people need to feel some real shame. Comparing the Democratic Party to the leadership of a totalitarian society, and treating it as an enemy of the country, isn't just ridiculous: it's an incitement to crazy people to act crazy or worse.

It's even beyond that I think. This dances on the thin edge of treason. Particularly ironic from the same party that was calling us traitors just for opposing the disastrous adventure in Iraq. [graphic]

6 Comments:

.Actually, democratic socialism is the centrist position in world politics. Nothing totalitarian about it. Hence the term "democratic."

It's only in countries and Parties that are so far to the radical Right that the center appears to be on the left that this kind of stupidity can be uttered. The American "center" is in fact pretty far right by world political standards.

I say we embrace the rebranding. Mixed-market European-style democratic socialism is just what we need in a lot of areas: Health care, mass transit, housing, education, etc. The so-called "free markets" under our system of crony capitalism have failed spectacularly, continually & continuously throughout our history to provide for these basic human needs, because there just isn't enough profit in providing them for everyone. Not unless they raise real wages and the entire standard of living goes up for the first time in forty years.

Yeah. Democratic Socialism. I like it. Let's run with it. We can use it to single out and eliminate the Blue Dogs, too. Win-win.

.That's what I'm sayin', Libby. The Gingrich witchhunt made oral sex a constant byword on TV & radio, entering every family's living, room, kitchen and minivan. A whole generation of kids grew up with a familiarity with the practice that their parents & grandparents could never have admitted to in public. The end result of all that hooey about hoo-ha's was not more conservative morality, but more liberal sexuality.

They don't seem to realize the subliminal message they are sending by being such unmitigated a-holes at all times: It's like, if your parents are for it, it must be unkewl. If they're against it, it's gotta be WAY kewl!

Accordingly, I believe we'll see an American brand of democratic socialism within a generation or two. Although I'm not sure how you would send pictures of that with your cell phone....